The FreeBSD Status Reports for the Second Quarter of 2008

From: Brad Davis <brd_at_FreeBSD.org>
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:48:23 -0600
The FreeBSD Status Reports for the Second Quarter of 2008 are now
available at:

http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2008-04-2008-06.html

For convenience I have included them below as well.


Regards,
Brad Davis

-------------------------------

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report

Introduction

   This Status Report covers FreeBSD related projects between April and
   June 2008. During this period The FreeBSD Foundation has released their
   July Newsletter.

   Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! We hope you enjoy
   reading.
     __________________________________________________________________

Google Summer of Code

     * Layer2 filtering
     * Porting BSD-licensed text-processing tools from OpenBSD

Projects

     * Build cluster
     * finstall
     * FreeBSD Bugbusting Team
     * Graphics support for the boot loader
     * USB

FreeBSD Architecture

     * ARM/Marvell port

The Ports Collection

     * Ports Collection
     * Qt/KDE4 Status Report

Documentation

     * FreeBSD FAQ Renovation
     * The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project
     * The FreeBSD Hungarian Documentation Project
     * The FreeBSD Spanish Documentation Project
     __________________________________________________________________

ARM/Marvell port

   URL:
   http://p4web.freebsd.org/_at_md=d&cd=//depot/projects/arm/src/sys/arm/orio
   n/&c=0h4_at_//depot/projects/arm/src/sys/arm/orion/?ac=83

   Contact: Rafal Jaworowski <raj_at_semihalf.com>
   Contact: Bartlomiej Sieka <tur_at_semihalf.com>

   After the last couple of months of intensive development going on
   towards FreeBSD support for Marvell System-on-Chip devices, we have
   FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT running on the following systems:
     * Orion (already available in Perforce):

     * 88F5281
     * 88F5181
     * 88F5182

     Kirkwood - 88F6281

     Discovery - MV78100

   The above families of SOCs are built around CPU cores compliant with
   ARMv5TE instruction set architecture definition. They share a number of
   integrated peripherals, for most of which we already have operational
   and stable drivers:
     * UART
     * EHCI USB 2.0
     * Ethernet
     * IDMA (general purpose DMA engine)
     * XOR
     * TWSI (I2C)
     * Timers, watchdog, RTC
     * GPIO
     * Interrupt controller
     * L1, L2 cache

   High level functional summary:
     * Production Quality
     * Error-free Operation
     * Multiuser
     * Self-hosted kernel/world builds
     * NFS- or USB-mounted root filesystem

   The code is partially available (Orion in Perforce), other variants
   will also be integrated with Perforce/SVN soon.

Open tasks:

    1. Drivers that are In-progress: PCI and PCIE.
     __________________________________________________________________

Build cluster

   Contact: Kris Kennaway <kris_at_FreeBSD.org>

   For the past couple of months I have been working on generalizing the
   package build cluster to allow it to host other batch and interactive
   jobs. Currently we make an inefficient use of build machines because
   various projects have dedicated machines that are either underloaded or
   overloaded for their particular tasks. The goal is to provide a
   framework for combining all of these machine resources into a single
   cluster that can be shared by many users, reducing dead time and
   allowing distributed build tasks to take advantage of extra build
   resources when available. Developers will be able to obtain on-demand
   interactive access to a jail running on any of the available
   architectures, with root access. Similarly, batch jobs will specify
   their resource requirements and be dispatched to run on a suitable
   machine in the cluster. Current status: The job queue manager is
   working and is now being used to map package builds to machines.
   Various package build scripts have been rewritten to use it instead of
   the previous build scheduler. The generic job dispatcher is being
   prototyped and will be validated with several existing services such as
   INDEX builds. Various support services like ZFS snapshot replication
   have been written.
     __________________________________________________________________

finstall

   URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/finstall
   URL: http://www.sf.net/projects/finstall

   Contact: Ivan Voras <ivoras_at_freebsd.org>

   Between the last report and this one, the project has yielded a LiveCD
   installer for i386 containing FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. The project was
   presented at BSDCan 2008. The development is progressing slowly due to
   the lack of free time. I'm looking for funding that will allow me more
   involvement in the project. The big item currently in development is
   documentation and description of the protocol used between the
   front-end and the back-end, which will result in more robustness in the
   implementation and could support third-party clients. This sub-project
   is near completion. The project is currently hosted at SourceForge to
   allow contribution from non-FreeBSD developers.

Open tasks:

    1. Partition editor.
    2. Package selection.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD Bugbusting Team

   URL: http://www.freebsd.org/support.html#gnats
   URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/BugBusting
   URL:
   http://people.freebsd.org/~linimon/studies/prs/pr_manpage_index.html
   URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~linimon/studies/prs/pr_tag_index.html
   URL:
   http://people.freebsd.org/~linimon/studies/prs/prs_possibly_committed.h
   tml
   URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~linimon/studies/prs/well_known_prs.html
   URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/JeremyChadwick/Commonly_reported_issues

   Contact: Ceri Davies <bugmeister_at_>
   Contact: Remko Lodder <bugmeister_at_>
   Contact: Mark Linimon <bugmeister_at_>

   We have granted Bruce Cran (bruce_at_) direct access to GNATS and Volker
   Werth (vwe_at_) has been released from mentorship. We appreciate their
   help!

   We had a third bugathon in June, which resulted in the closing of a
   number of bugs and the investigation/classification of several others.
   We are still trying to find ways to get more committers helping us with
   closing PRs that the team has already analyzed.

   We continue to make good progress in categorizing PRs as they arrive
   with 'tags' that correspond to manpages. (Special thanks go to Dylan
   Cochran for the help.) As a result, we now have created some prototype
   reports that allow browsing the database by manpage.

   In addition, another new report, oriented towards PR submitters,
   summarizes the most commonly reported issues. Many of these issues
   persist because they are difficult to fix. Before filing a PR, you may
   want to check through this list.

   Mark Linimon summarized the good technical suggestions from the
   bugathons so far this year to the wiki. As a part of this, he
   rearranged the wiki pages, so if you have not seen them for a while,
   please see BugBusting. In particular, the Resources page is much more
   complete.

   Jeremy Chadwick (koitsu_at_) is now maintaining a page that summarizes
   some of the commonly reported issues. This complements some of the
   reports, above, but includes a great deal more information, including
   how-tos.

   The overall PR count has been holding at around 5300 since the last
   release.

Open tasks:

    1. Think of some way for committers to only view PRs that have been in
       some way 'vetted' or 'confirmed'.
    2. Generate more publicity for what we've already got in place, and
       for what we intend to do next.
    3. Define new categories, classifications, and states for PRs, that
       will better match our workflow.
     __________________________________________________________________

FreeBSD FAQ Renovation

   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en/books/faq/
   URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/faq-renewal

   Contact: Gábor Páli <pgj_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Manolis Kiagias <manolis_at_FreeBSD.org>

   An extensive work on renovating the FreeBSD FAQ has been started to
   support its Greek and Hungarian translations. Further improvements and
   content changes are still possible, we hope other committers will help
   us to keep the FAQ updated and tuned further.

   We have launched a renewal proposal to collect and organize the ideas
   around a more interactive, accurate, open for comments, consistent
   across several views etc. FAQ document. We would like to experiment
   with methods to implement the goals mentioned before, and help is more
   than welcome.

Open tasks:

    1. Review the renovated FAQ.
    2. Add more question and answers to the FAQ.
    3. Refine the FAQ renewal proposal.
     __________________________________________________________________

Graphics support for the boot loader

   URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/OliverFromme/BootLoader

   Contact: Oliver Fromme <olli_at_freebsd.org>

   This project aims to implement graphics support for FreeBSD's boot
   loader. It will replace the existing ASCII menu. (Note that the ASCII
   menu will still be available when graphics mode cannot be used, such as
   on serial console or on unsupported hardware.)

   For a more detailed description and screen shots please refer to the
   project's Wiki URL above.

   Progress is slow (due to lack of time) but steady. The code currently
   lives in the Perforce repository. I'll try to prepare a first public
   CFT as soon as possible.

Open tasks:

    1. Implement a platform switch.
    2. Implement "themes" support (in FORTH).
    3. Documentation.
     __________________________________________________________________

Layer2 filtering

   URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/GlebKurtsov/Improving_layer2_filtering
   URL: http://blogs.freebsdish.org/gleb/

   Contact: Gleb Kurtsou <gk_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Andrew Thompson <thompsa_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Project aims to improve layer2 filtering in ipfw and pf. So far
   following project goals are achieved: pfil framework is extended to
   handle ethernet packets, ipfw layer2 filtering is greatly simplified,
   added l2filter and l2tag per interface flags. Both ipfw and pf
   firewalls support filtering by ethernet addresses, support stateful
   filtering with ethernet addresses and firewall's lookup tables are
   extended to contain ethernet addresses.

Open tasks:

    1. Implement ARP filtering options in IPFW.
     __________________________________________________________________

Porting BSD-licensed text-processing tools from OpenBSD

   URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/G%C3%A1borSoC2008
   URL:
   http://p4web.freebsd.org/_at_md=d&cd=//&c=Kqj_at_//depot/projects/soc2008/gab
   or_textproc/?ac=83

   Contact: Gábor Kövesdán <gabor_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The grep utility is ready for a thorough test on the portbuild cluster.
   It is almost compatible with GNU grep, but there are differences in the
   regex handling at the level of the regex libraries of GNU and the base
   system one, thus a better compatibility is very hard to implement.

   Some progress has been made on diff, but some important options are
   still missing. The sort utility seems to be very problematic in the
   aspect of the wide character support by design, thus it was given a
   lower priority.

Open tasks:

    1. Finish the incomplete options of diff and optimize it.
    2. Investigate about the opportunities to fix sort.
     __________________________________________________________________

Ports Collection

   URL: http://www.freebsd.org/ports/
   URL:
   http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributing-ports/
   URL: http://people.freebsd.org/~fenner/portsurvey/
   URL: http://portsmon.FreeBSD.org/index.html
   URL: http://www.freebsd.org/portmgr/index.html
   URL: http://tinderbox.marcuscom.com

   Contact: Mark Linimon <linimon_at_FreeBSD.org>

   The ports count has jumped to over 19,000. The PR count has been
   holding steady at around 900.

   KDE has been updated to 4.1. Special thanks go to Martin Wilke for a
   great deal of pre-testing.

   GNOME has been updated three times, first to 2.22.1 and then to 2.22.2
   and 2.22.3.

   Other notable updates are automake, gettext, libtool, and m4.

   Florent Thoumie has been working on some updates to the pkg_* tools.

   Ion-Mihai Tetcu has set up a tinderbox with several purposes: first, to
   quickly try to build packages as changes are committed; secondly, to
   build them with a non-standard set of environment variables; and
   thirdly, to build older packages with the non- standard set of
   environment variables. As a result of all this work, and work by
   various committers, we are much closer to building packages corrected
   in the NOPORTDOCS case.

   Kris Kennaway has done a substantial rewrite of the package building
   tools, including moving as a default to ZFS, which allows quick cloning
   of src and ports directories. It is now much easier to manage and
   monitor the builds. Work on this is continuing. See the commits to
   Tools/portbuild/scripts for more information. (Work is ongoing to
   update the Package Building article.) Related work has involved
   cleaning up some of the ports infrastructure; in particular, the INDEX
   builds are now much faster.

   We have been able to do many -exp runs since the last report, including
   those for bsd.cmake.mk, autotools update, CC environment passing, the
   KDE 4.1 pre-integration and post-integration checks, lockmgr changes,
   tty changes, and others.

   Although a number of PRs have been closed, we are still at 57 portmgr
   PRs, the same as the last report.

   The following large changes are in the pipeline:
     * Introduction of Perl 5.10

   We are currently building packages for amd64-6, amd64-7, amd64-8,
   i386-6, i386-7, i386-8, sparc64-6, and sparc64-7. RELENG_5 has reached
   the end of its supported life.

   We have added 4 new committers since the last report.

Open tasks:

    1. Most of the remaining ports PRs are "existing port/PR assigned to
       committer". Although the maintainer-timeout policy is helping to
       keep the backlog down, we are going to need to do more to get the
       ports in the shape they really need to be in.
    2. Although we have added many maintainers, we still have over 4,000
       unmaintained ports (see, for instance, the list on portsmon). We
       are always looking for dedicated volunteers to adopt at least a few
       unmaintained ports. As well, the packages on amd64 and sparc64 lag
       behind i386, and we need more testers for those.
     __________________________________________________________________

Qt/KDE4 Status Report

   URL: http://freebsd.kde.org

   Contact: Martin Wilke <miwi_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: FreeBSD KDE Team <kde_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Qt4 has been updated to 4.4.1 in our test repository. We ran into some
   runtime problems with Qt 4.4.0, so it was never committed it to the
   ports tree. Most of the problems have been fixed in 4.4.1 and we plan
   to commit it in a few days.

   At the moment, the KDE 4.1 ports are ready for testing before they are
   committed to the FreeBSD ports tree. We have already had the first Call
   for Public Testing on July 17th, 2008 with KDE 4.1 beta2. The feedback
   has been positive so far. If you want to help to test them to speed up
   the process, please visit the Wiki page and provide feedback.

   We plan to have it all committed by the middle of August.
     __________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project

   URL: http://www.freebsd-nl.org
   URL: http://www.evilcoder.org/freebsd_nl/

   Contact: Remko Lodder <remko_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Rene Ladan <r.c.ladan_at_gmail.com>

   The FreeBSD Dutch Documentation Project is an ongoing project to
   translate the FreeBSD Documentation resources to the Dutch language.

   The project is currently progressing very well in translating the
   FreeBSD Handbook to the Dutch language, the last chapter is being
   translated by the project members.

   Recent achievements include the translation of the Jails chapter, and
   the Virtualization chapter, as well as progression on the Advanced
   Networking chapter. Rene Ladan is a keyplayer in that region.

   We also started with the FAQ translation, which is another major target
   which we should be reaching at some point.

   If you care to helpout with the translation(s) and/or want to know
   something about it, please do not hesitate to contact us, we are glad
   to help where possible.

Open tasks:

    1. Finish the Handbook translation.
    2. Finish the FAQ translation.
    3. Finish the Website translation.
    4. Keep the projects in sync with the English version(s).
     __________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD Hungarian Documentation Project

   URL: http://FreeBSD.org/hu
   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/hu_HU.ISO8859-2/
   URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/HungarianDocumentationProject
   URL:
   http://p4web.freebsd.org/_at_md=d&cd=//depot/projects/docproj_hu/&c=aXw_at_//
   depot/projects/docproj_hu/?ac=83

   Contact: Gábor Kövesdán <gabor_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Gábor Páli <pgj_at_FreeBSD.org>

   Hungarian translation of the FreeBSD Handbook has been finally
   committed to the doc repository. The translation of the FreeBSD FAQ has
   also been started, however, the original document needed to be brought
   up to date first. Two other article translations has been added,
   compiz-fusion and linux-users.

   Our Perforce depot was reorganized for the better layout, giving
   newcomers more space to play. The checkupdate script written by
   Giorgos Keramidas, a new tool for checking translations has been
   adopted to help the project's work.

Open tasks:

    1. Translate release notes for -CURRENT and 7.X.
    2. Translate more articles.
    3. Translate books/fdp-primer.
     __________________________________________________________________

The FreeBSD Spanish Documentation Project

   URL: http://FreeBSD.org/es
   URL: http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/es_ES.ISO8859-1/
   URL: http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/SpanishDocumentationProject
   URL:
   http://p4web.freebsd.org/_at_md=d&cd=//depot/projects/docproj_es/&c=S1s_at_//
   depot/projects/docproj_es/?ac=83

   Contact: José Vicente Carrasco Vayá <carvay_at_FreeBSD.org>
   Contact: Gábor Kövesdán <gabor_at_FreeBSD.org>

   We have not made any significant progress in this period. We definitely
   need more active translators to progress with the translation project.

Open tasks:

    1. Complete renovation of the Spanish web site.
    2. Update Handbook translation.
    3. Translate release notes for -CURRENT and 7.X.
     __________________________________________________________________

USB

   URL:
   http://p4web.freebsd.org/_at_md=d&cd=//depot/projects/usb/src/sys/dev/usb2
   /&c=oDu_at_//depot/projects/usb/src/sys/dev/usb2/?ac=83
   URL:
   http://p4web.freebsd.org/_at_md=d&cd=//&cdf=//depot/projects/usb/src/sys/d
   ev/usb2/core/README.TXT&c=Vfw_at_//depot/projects/usb/src/sys/dev/usb2/cor
   e/README.TXT?ac=64&rev1=2

   Contact: Hans Petter Sirevaag Selasky <hselasky_at_freebsd.org>

   During the last three months there has been a number of changes. Most
   notably all global USB symbols have been renamed to "usb2_" to allow
   for co-existence with the old USB stack. Also there is now a completely
   new and reworked UGEN driver which allows multiple drivers to hook onto
   the same USB device. No more need to unload any kernel drivers. For
   example it is now possible to have a userland Mouse driver stealing
   half of the mouse events at the same time "ums" is loaded. The only
   disadvantage is that your mouse cursor will move slower on the screen.
   This is maybe not the most common use-case, but it illustrates that
   kernel USB drivers are no longer locking out other USB userland
   drivers. A new userland libusb is in the works for FreeBSD. The USB
   stack now also has support for independent USB BUS, USB Device, and USB
   Interface permissions. That means you can more easily give USB
   permissions to USB device drivers at either USB BUS, USB Device or USB
   Interface level. All USB modules have now been grouped into functional
   categories: usb2_bluetooth, usb2_ndis, usb2_controller, usb2_quirk,
   usb2_core, usb2_serial, usb2_ethernet, usb2_sound, usb2_image,
   usb2_storage, usb2_input, usb2_template, usb2_misc, and usb2_wlan.

   Ideas and comments with regard to the new USB API are welcome on the
   FreeBSD-USB Mailing List.
     __________________________________________________________________
Received on Wed Aug 20 2008 - 13:48:38 UTC

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